Many of you are in the field of performance improvement and learning is a big deal to us. We want to help people grow CAPACITY. The traditional ways we’ve delivered learning (aka training) are disappearing quickly. The excuses of workload, changing roles and lack of budget have always existed so why the pushback now? The paradox is that people want and like to learn but there’s so many horrible training classes and a confusing magnitude of learning delivery mechanisms. It’s getting too hard or too boring to learn.

I’m watching the field of impactful learning begin to look like a great marketing campaign. Blended learning is exactly what good marketers do – they assess the audience and the need then throw all kinds of different but aligned messages at the prospects to engage them in buying. I am not saying that the marketing technology is the secret sauce, instead, I’m suggesting that the marketing process is. Good marketing fights very hard to grad your emotions and keep your attention. They work back from the specific audiences’ need to define the best ways to influence.

In learning and development (or whatever we call it now), we love to think up a new, cool class. We choose the content and delivery that we think is amazing and drop it on the learner. This is the opposite of marketing. More learning would occur and performance improved if we spent more time on grabbing emotions and attention and less on cool software with badges dumped on our unsuspecting learners. ​Stealing from marketing, we can imitate: